Capacity-aware cost-efficient network reconstruction for post-disaster scenario

Abstract

Natural disasters can result in severe damage to communication infrastructure, which leads to further chaos to the damaged area. After the disaster strikes, most of the victims would gather at the evacuation sites for food supplies and other necessities. Having a good communication network is very important to help the victims. In this paper, we aim at recovering the network from the still-alive mobile base stations to the out-of-service evacuation sites by using multi-hop relaying technique. We propose to reconstruct the post-disaster network in a capacity-aware way based on prize collecting Steiner tree. The purpose of the proposed scheme is to achieve high capacity connectivity ratio in a cost efficient way. To provide more accurate evaluation results, we evaluate the proposed scheme by using the real evacuation site and base station data in Tokyo area, and utilizing the big data analysis based post-disaster service availability model.